The urban politics literature finds municipal elections are highly racialized, but it is unclear how this is reflected in redistricting. I analyze the implementation of majority-minority districts in 133 cities during the 2010 redistricting cycle. I find that in cities where Black or Hispanic citizens are minorities, they are proportionally underrepresented in city council districts, but are overrepresented in cities where they make up the majority. To isolate the role of residential segregation, I use a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from the underlying distribution of plausible maps. The proportion of Hispanic-majority districts implemented generally matches median simulated plans, but nearly one-third of cities implemented more Black-majority districts than the median simulation. The proportion of Black city council members positively predicts the gap between the median proportion of majority-minority districts simulated and the proportion implemented. I then link this data to the electoral outcomes of racially identified candidates. I find that majority-minority and majority-White districts elect co-racial or co-ethnic candidates in over 75% of elections (n = 2,434). Finally, I predict the number of Black and Hispanic councilors elected under simulated plans. Implemented plans led to an estimated 9.5% more Black councilors on average, but roughly the same number of Hispanic councilors.
How are legislators incentivized to behave when their primary and general electorates disagree about an issue? We argue that primary electorates are generally more unified in their issue preferences and more sensitive to roll-call positions than general electorates, incentivizing legislators to prioritize primary voters when facing conflicting demands from the two groups. Using the 2016 Cooperative Election Study and an original survey experiment with over 13,000 respondents, we show that primary voters are both more unified and more likely to adjust their vote choice based on policy alignment. When we combine electorate unity and voter sensitivity, we find that US senators had more to gain by siding with their primary electorate in 84% of the votes where they were cross-pressured. This helps explain why politicians are incentivized to cater to their primary electorate-shaping patterns of representation and policy outcomes in American politics.
We analyze the implications of seniority voting on Supreme Court decision-making. We provide reduced-form evidence consistent with justices learning from the votes of their senior colleagues as determined by the voting mechanism. To explain this evidence, we develop and estimate a model of sequential voting with social learning. In the model, justices weigh spatial payoffs against the appropriateness of their disposition and consider their preferences, private information and the choices of senior justices. We recover estimates of judicial preferences, expertise and learning and use them to assess the quality of Supreme Court dispositions relative to alternative voting mechanisms. We find that the quality of the Court’s dispositions would have improved under an anti-seniority rule, in which junior justices are allowed to vote first.
Politicians often have discretion over what policy information to reveal to the public. This paper develops a formal model comparing electoral accountability under mandatory and discretionary disclosure. I identify a fundamental trade-off between detection - where voters directly observe wrongdoing - and inference - where voters penalize the suspicious absence of information. Mandates facilitate detection but eliminate the strategic signal embedded in discretionary disclosure. Mandates weaken the connection between silence and possible wrongdoing, effectively exonerating the incumbent in voters' inferences. The model demonstrates that when the baseline probability of information transmission is high, the inference-based mechanism constrains rent-seeking more effectively than the detection-based mechanism. Consequently, disclosure mandates can paradoxically weaken electoral discipline: by making silence less informative, they undermine voters' ability to draw inferences from silence, even while increasing the overall probability that voters observe policy outcomes.
This study investigates the relationship between running for president and members’ contributions to the core legislative functions that impact Congress’s standing relative to the presidency. This study finds some evidence that ambitious legislators attend roll call votes and oversight hearings at lower rates, but at the same time, they are more legislatively productive, conduct just as much informal oversight and are equally informational in their public oversight. When Congress votes on an issue that affects the balance of power between Congress and the president, they are more likely to side with Congress than legislators without presidential ambitions are. These behavioral differences persist even after their presidential runs, which suggests they are not driven by a strategic effort to audition for the presidency.
